Introduction
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Introduction The Other Voice In her never-finishedAccount of My Life’s Travels and Adventures,1 the Polish ocu- list Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa (1718–after 1763) plays a myriad of roles includ- ing child bride, wife, mother, lover, adventuress, slave trader, writer, and home- brewed physician.2 Born in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (modern Belarus), part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,3 her peripatetic travels spanned central, eastern, and southeastern Europe from the Ottoman Empire (where she eventually settled) and the Balkans to the Holy Roman Empire, Poland-Lithuania, and Russia. Her very personal and idiosyncratic memoir,4 written around 17605 on 388 manuscript pages, and heretofore unavailable in its entirety in English, explores from a distinctively female perspective the vivid, richly woven tapestry of eighteenth-century life, especially the social, professional, and religious inter- actions between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and between men and women. Her work forms an invaluable repository of popular history, ethnographic, reli- gious, and geographical observations, and a storehouse of fascinating vignettes of love, travel, romance, hatreds, and superstitions. Modern researchers, who only opened her memoir more than a century after her death, have been attracted 1. The full title may be translatedAn Echo Spreading through the World of the Account of My Travels and Life’s Adventures, in Praise and Honor of God in Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary and All Saints, from the original Polish, Echo Na Swiat podane Procederu podróży y Życia mego Awantur: Na cześć y Chwałe P. Bogu w Swiętey Truycy jedynemu y Naswięszey Matce Chrystusa Pana mego y Wszystkim Swietym. 2. Pilsztynowa’s memoir is available in the authoritative modern edition: Regina Salomea z Rusieckich Pilsztynowa, Proceder podrózy i życia mego awantur [An Account of My Life’s Travels and Adventures], ed. by Roman Pollak (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1957). Cited henceforth as Pilsztynowa, ed. Pollak. The English translation included in this volume and based on Pollak’s edition will be cited as Pilsztynowa, My Life’s Travels and Adventures, and in short-form, Travels. 3. A major power in central and eastern Europe, originating in a personal union between the rulers of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1386–1569) and then linked into a federated dual state (1569–1795) following the Union of Lublin. It fell after the Partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) divided it among its absolutist neighbors Austria, Prussia, and Russia. The current Polish III Republic and (to a lesser extent) modern Lithuania, consider themselves the successor states of the Commonwealth. 4. She signed her title page “Salomeja Regina de Pilsztynowa, Medycyny Doktorka i Okulistka w r. 1760 w Stambule,” or, “Salomé Regina de Pilstein, Medical Doctor and Oculist, in Istanbul, 1760.” Her dedication page to Ludwika Potocka, widow of Crown Grand Hetman Józef Potocki, on the other hand, bears the inscription “Regina Salomea Makowska, MD and Oculist.” 5. That is the date Pilsztynowa provides on the title page, and again twice more in chapter four. Some textual clues could be interpreted to mean a few parts of the Travels were written in 1761. 1 2 Introduction to and repelled by this extraordinary author, who has been called, among other things, the “Polish She-Devil,” an “adventuress,” or “Poland’s first female doctor.”6 Pilsztynowa’s Travels offers an intimate and exciting glimpse of a period and a society that are at once distant and yet near, still resonating in our contemporary world. In many ways her voice, so loud and clear in the pages of her memoir, is (or, perhaps, should be) the disregarded voice of the Other: a stranger in a foreign land, a female Catholic Pole in a Muslim male-dominated society, a practicing woman physician in a field reserved for men, an unattached woman (though she was married at least twice, she lived mostly separated from her husbands) in a world where women’s roles, from birth to death, were stringently defined and controlled. That she managed successfully, contrary to every expectation, to carve out for herself a viable niche, an early “room of her own,” and to become a highly sought-after and well-respected practitioner of the medical arts, testifies to her own refusal to accept for herself the identification with the Other, a helpless subal- tern, with no power and no speech. Her speech, her Travels, are eloquent indeed. Moreover, Pilsztynowa’s memoir is a work by an unschooled member of the growing professional middle class, and therefore a rare gem in the avail- able canon of eighteenth-century memoir literature. Unlike her contemporary, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,7 or her near-contemporary countrywoman Anna Stanisławska,8 she did not hail from high aristocracy or magnate lineage, and un- like the earlier Anna Maria Marchocka9 who had made her world in a cloister, 6. Conveniently, all three descriptions can be found in a single online source: Lidia Kawecka’s popu- lar write-up of Pilsztynowa’s travels and adventures on a Polish travel site: Polska Diablica. Onet.pl., https://podroze.onet.pl/ciekawe/polska-diablica/l6ty8ng. 7. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) began to write her famous Turkish Embassy Letters, which included her advocacy for smallpox inoculation, after she accompanied her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu (1678–1761), in his role as Great Britain’s ambassador to the Porte (1716–1718). Mary Wortley Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters, ed. Teresa Heffernan and Daniel O’Quinn (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2013). Billie Melman calls Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters the first of their kind, a first secular description of Ottoman life by a woman’s hand. First published, yes, perhaps, but Pilsztynowa’s account preceded Montagu’s by three years. Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion, and Work (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1992), 78. 8. Anna Stanisławska (1651–1701), the daughter of a Polish magnate family, wrote an account of her life and her unhappy and happy marriages in verse around 1685, making her one of the first known Polish female authors. The first part of her verse epic, entitled Transakcja albo opisanie całego życia jednej sieroty przez żałosne treny od tejże samej pisane roku 1685, is now available in translation: Anna Stanisławska, Orphan Girl: A Transaction, or an Account of the Entire Life of an Orphan Girl by way of Plentiful Threnodies in the Year 1685: The Aesop Episode, trans. Barry Keane (Toronto: Iter Press; Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016). 9. Anna Maria Marchocka (1603–1652) was a discalced Carmelite nun who eventually rose to the position of a prioress of the Carmelite convent in Kraków. Her autobiography, started in 1647, Introduction 3 Pilsztynowa embraced her gentry10 roots, and represents that most unusual com- bination of an early modern self-made woman who, among the travels and travails of her life-story, found time enough for literary self-fashioning and expression. Her self-positioning has made her inclusion in the canon of Polish Baroque memoirs—and, by extension, in the genre of European Baroque literature in gen- eral—a point of scholarly contention that has refused to yield, so far, a general con- sensus. Some scholars see her Travels as something “unique and incomparable,”11 a singular literary curiosity written by a singularly curious woman, and they attempt to unpack her work from the perspective of the contradictions it creates.12 They circulated in manuscript shortly after her death and was finally published a century later to become an inspiration for Polish religious devotion. Anna Maria Marchocka, Autobiografia mistyczna m. Teresy od Jezusa, karm. bosej (Anny Marii Marchockiej), 1603–1652 [The Mystical Autobiography of the Barefoot Carmelite Teresa of Jesus (Anna Maria Marchocka), 1603–1652], ed. Karol Górski (Poznań: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, 2009). Though the entirety of her autobiography is, as of yet, unavailable in English, some discussion is provided by Roland H. Bainton, Women of the Reformation: From Spain to Scandinavia (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1977), 177–82; Ursula Phillips, “Polish Women Authors: From the Middle Ages until 1800,” in A History of Central European Women’s Writing, ed. Celia Hawkesworth (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 14–24; and Liliana Sikorska, “Between Autohagiography and Confession: Generic Concerns and the Question of Female Self-Representation in Anna Maria Marchocka’s ‘Mystical Autobiography,’ ” Florilegium 23.1 (2006), 85–96. For a Polish language attempt to fit Marchocka within the genre of mystical literature, see Katarzyna Kaczor-Scheitler, “Działalność pisarska polskich zakonów żeńskich w dobie baroku” [The Literary Activity of Polish Female Orders in the Baroque Period], Litteraria 13 (2010): 77–89, and Halina Popławska, “Autobiografia mistyczna” [Mistical Autobiography], in Religijność literatury pol- skiego baroku [Religiosity in the Literature of the Polish Baroque], ed. Czesław Hernas and Mirosława Hanusiewicz (Lublin: Tow. Nauk. Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 1995). 10. The term “gentry” can have many definitions, depending on the place, time, and the social system. Though Pilsztynowa’s family belonged to poor but still landed minor Polish-Lithuanian nobility, or szlachta, the fact her parents married her off to a non-noble professional speaks volumes. 11. This is discussed